Wow, indeed, Alison.
I thank you for all the thinking youve done here. And Hal for his
resistance, too.
I think I'm with you on this; especially the part about not worrying
about what's on the net, but definitely worrying about what Google
wants to do with it all for its own sake.
I have never made much money fro my poems, & am happy enough to let
them go for free to the various places I've placed them, but those
places dont make money off them.
Google might (although in my case, it would be highly unlikely to do
so; in yours, especially for the fiction, yeah, it could).
Where's that utterly free net the utopian cyberpunks envisioned?
Doug
On 23-Jan-10, at 12:38 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
> Wow. 6am and I haven't slept - too much coffee yesterday. So I've
> spent the night meeting the deadlines I planned to meet tomorrow
> (today), since I know I'll be too buggered to do them otherwise.
>
> And now I'm sitting here, kind of astounded by the meh over the Google
> Books thing.
>
> I'm personally fairly laissez faire about the internet. Over the past
> 15 years or so, I've put tons of work out there, both my own and
> others, for free - in magazines that have asked me for poems, or in
> Masthead, or in all those poetryetc projects, or on Theatre Notes.
> I've never objected to fanfic of my work - when fans asked me I gave
> them the necessary permissions so they could upload their stuff to
> FanFiction.net without any hesitation. A couple of months or so ago I
> found that I'm also being enthusiastically pirated on sites like
> BitTorrent - around 200,000 downloads, at my most conservative
> estimate. I thought about that, and it didn't worry me - I figure that
> some of them will buy the books if they like them, and the rest, well,
> I'm not going to run to the publishers bleating copyright
> infringement, because that goes against how I figure the energies of
> the net works. It's just a bunch of individuals filesharing.
>
> The point is that aside from those naughty pirates, I am always asked,
> just as I always ask others before I publish their work. The point is
> that Google isn't asking, it's taking.You can be sure that Google
> isn't doing this out of the goodness of its heart - it is planning to
> make a lot of money out of this.
>
> A private mega-corporation overturning the basic tenets of the Berne
> Convention through a predatory fiat ratified through a US court
> *without any international representation* doesn't just change the
> rules, it changes the game.
>
> This goes well beyond self interest. That's what I don't get about
> the meh.
>
> xA
Douglas Barbour
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http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest books:
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Swept snow, Li Po,
by dawn's 40-watt moon
to the road that hies to office
away from home.
Lorine Niedecker
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